The Complete Resume Guide — Part 2

At the start of many application processes, resumes are the one medium of communication between you and a recruiter. They should effectively and clearly communicate your relevant experience, skill, and traits for a specific type of job.

Throughout this entire process, you should have a type of job and general job description in mind to guide your creation. For different types of jobs, consider creating different resumes with the experience tailored to the job description. The job description will be the list of traits to emphasize.

Remember the actual experience and ability you have is far more important than how you organize your resume. A resume shouldn’t be what differentiates you from other candidates, it should serve to emphasize what does. Here we go…

Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash

1) Formatting Your Resume

Since recruiters can go through hundreds of resumes at a time, resumes that are drastically different or unclear are much more difficult to quickly understand. Yours should be visually clear and organized — this means clear title headings, sparse bolding, ample white space, and readable fonts. If everything is bold and emphasized, nothing is.

I personally really like more creative, visual, and communicative resumes, but often the more traditional companies and older recruiters don’t. Stick to the basics unless you are in a creative field (art, media, marketing) or applying to younger tech companies.

Most companies use applicant tracking systems(ATSs) to screen resumes introducing many quirks to this process. The variety of systems that are constantly evolving means the conflicting advice here can be pretty confusing. There are reports that ATS doesn’t play nice with anything atypical including fancy formatting, layouts, images/icons, and multiple columns. You can see how your resume might be parsed by running it through some resume scanners (Glassdoor, JobScan). Because it’s too variable and not timeless, I won’t go in depth on formatting for ATS, but see this article for more info.

There are several choices for where to actually make your resume. For simple single column layouts, Word works fine. Beyond the basics, Latex, another typesetting tool, offers a standardized professional look and there are many great templates online. I once spent hours dragging text boxes and images laying out a pixel-perfect resume in the design tool Sketch and do not recommend. For all these options though, changing the layout and details as your career grows is difficult.

My overall recommendation is some modern freemium resume builders (Novoresume, Creddle, StandardResume, or Ceev) that simplify the process without being too constraining. They have some nice features like beautiful templates, automatic reformatting, and importing Linkedin. In the long run, a reformattable resume will save you time as your career grows and your resume needs to change too.

2) Choosing what to even put on a resume

You are condensing your entire life down to a single sheet of paper. What you put on your resume is as important as what you don’t, but this process of selection is often overlooked. Your life is long and complex and it’s easy to forget relevant activities especially ones you thought were “no big deal”.

For that reason, I recommend you make a CV right now. It is simply a list of every professionally relevant thing you have done. Write everything you can think of down with some basic descriptions. In the future, when you are creating a resume or answering questions about leadership experiences or group projects, a CV will be a great resource. Linkedin is a great place to showcase this list, provide more details than your resume, and interact with recruiters.

Here’s a list of things to think about as you recall your life’s work —

• achievements
• internships
• education
• classwork
• awards
• clubs
• competitions
• volunteering
• professional events (conferences/hackathons)
• skills
• workshops
• projects

Focus on experience that differentiates you by being exclusive or difficult e.g awards, leadership roles, internships, universities. Let the recruiter trust someone else’s vetting process.

If you are making a resume for the first time in college, high school stuff will be the bulk of your experience and that is expected. But college is a much more competitive environment. So as you grow, college experience can offer more timely experiences showcasing your relevant excellence.

Also, make sure each addition adds some new insight into your skill or motivation. If you already list a high GPA, listing your acceptance into an honor society and the Dean’s Honor Roll is really just conveying the same thing. If you served as the treasurer then president of your acapella club, consider just putting president.

3) What Sections?

The header of your resume introduces yourself and contact information. Make sure to use a professional modern email like your school email — jbruin@ucla.edu is much more professional than pandas8mydad@yahoo.com. Additional links like ones to your personal website, portfolio, Github, or LinkedIn can also be put here.

Next, some resume templates suggest an objective statement like the one below.

The objective of anyone applying is to get a job. Did that really add any information to an application then? Another option is a professional summary serving as a minor cover letter pitching your experience. These can be attractive if your resume is sparse or you actually have specific interests, but if it isn’t personal, don’t bother.

The rest of your experience should go into categories with the most important ones near the top. The essential sections are work experience and education and should be emphasized at the top of your resume.

Other common section titles are —

• Leadership
• Skills
• Awards
• Projects
• Professional Organizations
• Organizations
• Volunteering
• Extracurriculars
• Research
• Coursework
• Hobbies/Interests

Ultimately the right sections for you are based on the parts of your experience that you want to emphasize and the granularity you need to break up the content. But, I’ll try to offer some guidelines.

Remember, recruiters are trying to gauge your soft skills, hard skills, and motivation compared to other applicants. As the most reliable and unbiased measure of a good hire, the primary factor will be the hard skills. So, you should focus on all the relevant experience and skills you have for the field. Strong soft skills and general motivation can give you an edge over candidates with similar hard skills. These secondary factors, though seemingly unrelated to your job, can provide insight into who you are and what interests you. So if dance or sports or chess is a significant part of your life, then definitely consider putting it on your resume.

4) Writing Your Descriptions

Remember that all the recruiter will get to see is your resume; nothing but the words you write will generate their impression of you. They have no idea about your background, the difficulty of your accomplishments, or the effort you put into them. You must make it clear to them. Emphasize the things that are notable and difficult.

This is very intuitive advice, meaning everyone is trying to glorify and fluff everything on their resume. Everyone is trying to learn what recruiters care about and make anything, even minor roles, sound like significant accomplishments and experiences. And so recruiters have to shift through resume after resume of deep bullshit and recognize what is actually good.

Recruiters, like you, hate dishonesty and pretentiousness and will notice obvious examples. So it is important to emphasize the difficult parts, not make every part sound difficult.

With every resume sprinkled liberally with adjectives, all recruiters can really look for are differentiating facts that allow relevant and reliable comparisons on the three main categories: hard skills, soft skills, and motivation.

Differentiating facts are accomplishments like leadership roles, work positions, awards, and side projects. Quantifiable metrics are another excellent example. “Increased site traffic by 50% with a $5000 advertising campaign” is a much better detail than “skilled growth hacker passionate about increasing efficiency of small business hyperlocal ad campaigns”.

Here’s another example: “Hard-working student and voracious learner displaying academic excellence.” Um, nice biased adjectives… Anyone can say that.

Let’s try again: “top 10% of the class at UCLA”. Well, UCLA is the number one public university so that allows a reliable, relevant, and differentiating comparison to the rest of the applicant pool.

For inspiration, ask around for the old resumes of respectable people. Their similar experiences can give you an idea of how to portray your own. For example, here are some excellent resumes of members of Sigma Eta Pi, UCLA’s entrepreneurship fraternity.

Here are 3 more ideas to keep in mind as you write your descriptions:

1. Avoid cliches; they are meaningless, obvious, and boring to read. “Team player.”, “Track record of success.”, “Strong communication, customer service, and organizational skills.” If you can put it on any resume, it doesn’t belong on yours.
2. Realize the recruiter doesn’t go to your school or know all your favorite acronyms. They don’t know what titles like MATH 32A, FAM, or ASCM mean; you have to tell them. If you have a classwork section, then convey the class topic, which might not be the name. Instead of “Object-Oriented Design and Implementation”, put “Object-Oriented Programming in C++”.
3. Focus on action, impact, and accomplishments rather than responsibilities or opinions. What conveys the accomplishment best, “I organized an annual hackathon including sourcing corporate sponsors, design, and logistics as Director of La Hacks” OR “Director of LA Hacks leading team of over 20 students on hosting over 1,000 students and sourcing and working with 20 corporate sponsors”? Leading with action verbs can create a strong impression.

By now, you should have good general principles to apply when creating your resume and assessing your own value and differentiating facts. This understanding can help you throughout the entire recruiting process from interviews to negotiation. Making a good resume is simply one step in a long walk to landing a great job.

So, what should you put on your resume?

Well, I don’t know the answer to that question, but now you might.